As part of the software development process, organizations define many policies to govern all aspects of the process. This is typically done to protect code quality and the organization's intellectual property. These policies commonly include items such as (1) who can check-in, merge, branch or check-out code from what codelines at various stages of the development process; (2) what kinds of changes (new features, critical bug fixes, etc.) are allowed at various stages of the development process; and (3) what level of review is required for changes into codelines in the various stages of the development process.
Conventionally, these processes are enforced through management oversight. Management oversight usually involves systems that include only very basic access controls to source control systems. In other words, these systems are typically all or nothing in nature: either allowing all authorized users to make changes at a given time or preventing all changes by any user. These simple measures do not allow organizations to automatically enforce more complicated change policies. This lack of enforcement can lead to unauthorized changes being made to sensitive work products. These unauthorized changes can (and often do) lead to system failures which can have large negative economic consequences.
Note that the approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.